Product Description

The book you hold in your hands is revolutionary, a groundbreaking exploration of the science of intention.Drawing on the findings of leading scientists from around the world, The Intention Experiment demonstrates that thought is a thing that affects other things. It is also the first book to invite you, the reader, to take an active part in its original research.

Using cutting-edge research conducted at Princeton,MIT, Stanford, and many other prestigious universities and laboratories, The Intention Experiment reveals that the universe is connected by a vast quantum energy field.Thought generates its own palpable energy, which you can use to improve your life and, when harnessed together with an interconnected group, to change the world.

In The Intention Experiment, internationally bestselling author Lynne McTaggart takes you on a gripping, mind-blowing journey to the furthest reaches of consciousness.As she narrates the exciting developments in the science of intention, she also profiles the colorful scientists and renowned pioneers who study the effects of focused group intention on scientifically quantifiable targets -- animal, plant, and human.

McTaggart offers a practical program to get in touch with your own thoughts, to increase the activity and strength of your intentions, and to begin achieving real change in your life. You are then invited to participate in an unprecedented experiment: Using The Intention Experiment website to coordinate your involvement and track results, you and other participants around the world will focus your power of intention on specific targets, giving you the opportunity to become a part of scientific history. A new Afterword by the author recounts the successes of the several Intention Experiments so far.

The Intention Experiment forces you to rethink what it is to be human. It proves that we're connected to everyone and everything -- and that discovery demands that we pay better attention to our thoughts, intentions, and actions. Here's how you can.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1966 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-05
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
"If you want to explore the latest science behind The Secret, look no further. Science and wisdom collide and make friends in this real-world adventure that is ultimately a guidebook for living."-- Drew Heriot, director of The Secret

"Lynne McTaggart has zeroed in on a wonderful collection of experiments and events that shatters our normal materialistic assumptions of time, space, and everything in between (if there is an in-between). It's as mind-bending as it's meant to be."-- William Arntz, producer, writer, and director of What the BLEEP Do We Know!? and author of What the BLEEP Do We Know!? - Discovering the Endless Possibilities For Altering Your Everyday Reality

"Very few books are able to transform information into inspiration--concepts into action--word into deed. The Intention Experiment does exactly that. In a style that is highly entertaining and accessible, McTaggart reminds us of an eternal truth too often overlooked: Each of us possesses the power of the Universe WITHIN. Now that is a transformational read!"-- Ward M. Powers, Filmmaker and Director, ONE: The Movie

"The Intention Experiment is an extraordinary advance in our understanding of consciousness as a field of all possibilities where intention orchestrates its own fulfillment. If you want to empower yourself and use the laws of intention to manifest your material reality, read this book." -- Deepak Chopra, author of Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment

About the Author
Lynne McTaggart is an internationally recognized spokesperson on the science of spirituality and the award-winning author of five books, including The Field, which has been published in fourteen languages. She is also co-executive director of Conatus, which publishes some of the world's most respected health and spiritual newsletters, including What Doctors Don't Tell You and Living the Field. She lives in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

This book represents a piece of unfinished business that began in 2001 when I published a book called The Field. In the course of trying to find a scientific explanation for homeopathy and spiritual healing, I had inadvertently uncovered the makings of a new science.

During my research, I stumbled across a band of frontier scientists who had spent many years reexamining quantum physics and its extraordinary implications. Some had resurrected certain equations regarded as superfluous in standard quantum physics. These equations, which stood for the Zero Point Field, concerned the extraordinary quantum field generated by the endless passing back and forth of energy between all subatomic particles. The existence of the Field implies that all matter in the universe is connected on the subatomic level through a constant dance of quantum energy exchange.

Other evidence demonstrated that, on the most basic level, each one of us is also a packet of pulsating energy constantly interacting with this vast energy sea.

But the most heretical evidence of all concerned the role of consciousness. The well-designed experiments conducted by these scientists suggested that consciousness is a substance outside the confines of our bodies -- a highly ordered energy with the capacity to change physical matter. Directing thoughts at a target seemed capable of altering machines, cells, and, indeed, entire multicelled organisms like human beings. This mind-over-matter power even seemed to traverse time and space.

In The Field I aimed to make sense of all the ideas resulting from these disparate experiments and to synthesize them into one generalized theory. The Field created a picture of an interconnected universe and a scientific explanation for many of the most profound human mysteries, from alternative medicine and spiritual healing to extrasensory perception and the collective unconscious.

The Field apparently hit a nerve. I received hundreds of letters from readers who told me that the book had changed their lives. A writer wanted to depict me as a character in her novel. Two composers wrote musical compositions inspired by it, one of which played on the international stage. I was featured in a movie, What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole, and on the What The Bleep Do We Know!? Calendar, released by the film's producers. Quotations from The Field became the centerpiece of a printed Christmas card.

However gratifying this reaction, I felt that my own journey of discovery had hardly left the station platform. The scientific evidence I had amassed for The Field suggested something extraordinary and even disturbing: directed thought had some sort of central participatory role in creating reality.

Targeting your thoughts -- or what scientists ponderously refer to as "intention" and "intentionality" -- appeared to produce an energy potent enough to change physical reality. A simple thought seemed to have the power to change our world.

After writing The Field, I puzzled over the extent of this power and the numerous questions it raised. How, for instance, could I translate what had been confirmed in the laboratory for use in the world that I lived in? Could I stand in the middle of a railroad and, Superman-style, stop the 9:45 Metroliner with my thoughts? Could I fly myself up to fix my roof with a bit of directed thought? Would it now be possible to cross doctors and healers off my list of essential contacts, seeing as I might now be able to think myself well? Could I help my children pass their math tests just by thinking about it? If linear time and three-dimensional space didn't really exist, could I go back and erase all those moments in my life that had left me with lasting regret? And could my one puny bit of mental input do anything to change the vast catalog of suffering on the planet?

The implications of this evidence were unsettling. Should we be minding every last thought at every moment? Was a pessimist's view of the world likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy? Were all those negative thoughts -- that ongoing inner dialogue of judgment and criticism -- having any effect outside our heads?

Were there conditions that improved your chances of having a better effect with your thoughts? Would a thought work any old time or would you, your intended target, and indeed the universe itself have to be in the mood? If everything is affecting everything else at every moment, doesn't that counteract and thereby nullify any real effect?

What happens when a number of people think the same thought at the same time? Would that have an even larger effect than thoughts generated singly? Was there a threshold size that a group of like-minded intenders had to reach in order to exert the most powerful effect? Was an intention "dose dependent" -- the larger the group, the larger the effect?

An enormous body of literature, starting with Think and Grow Rich,1 by Napoleon Hill, arguably the first self-actualization guru, has been generated about the power of thought. Intention has become the latest new age buzzword. Practitioners of alternative medicine speak of helping patients heal "with intention." Even Jane Fonda writes about raising children "with intention."2

What on Earth, I wondered, was meant by "intention"? And how exactly can one become an efficient "intender"? The bulk of the popular material had been written off the cuff -- a smattering of Eastern philosophy here, a soupçon of Dale Carnegie there -- with very little scientific evidence that it worked.

To find answers to all these questions, I turned, once again, to science, scouring the scientific literature for studies on distant healing or other forms of psychokinesis, or mind over matter. I sought out international scientists who experimented with how thoughts can affect matter. The science described in The Field had been carried out mainly in the 1970s; I examined more recent discoveries in quantum physics for further clues.

I also turned to those people who had managed to master intention and who could perform the extraordinary -- spiritual healers, Buddhist monks, Qigong masters, shamans -- to be able to understand the transformational processes they underwent to be able to use their thoughts to powerful effect. I uncovered myriad ways that intention is used in real life -- in sports, for instance, and during healing modalities such as biofeedback. I studied how native populations incorporated directed thought into their daily rituals.

I then began to dig up evidence that multiple minds trained on the same target magnified the effect produced by an individual. The evidence was tantalizing, mostly gathered by the Transcendental Meditation organization, suggesting that a group of like-minded thoughts created some sort of order in the otherwise random Zero Point Field.

At that point in my journey, I ran out of pavement. All that stretched before me, as far as I could tell, was uninhabited open terrain.

Then one evening, my husband, Bryan, a natural entrepreneur in most situations, put forward what seemed to be a preposterous suggestion: "Why don't you do some group experiments yourself?"

I am not a physicist. I am not any kind of scientist. The last experiment I had conducted had been in a tenth-grade science lab.

What I did have, though, was a resource available to few scientists: a potentially huge experimental body. Group intention experiments are extraordinarily difficult to perform in an ordinary laboratory. A researcher would need to recruit thousands of participants. How would he find them? Where would he put them? How would he get them all to think the same thing at the same time?

A book's readers offer an ideal self-selected group of like-minded souls who might be willing to participate in testing out an idea. Indeed, I already had my own large population of regular readers with whom I communicated through e-news and my other spin-off activities from The Field.

I first broached the idea of carrying out my own experiment with dean emeritus of the Princeton University School of Engineering Robert Jahn and his colleague, psychologist Brenda Dunne, who run the Princeton Engineering Anomalous Research (PEAR) laboratory, both of whom I had gotten to know through my research for The Field. Jahn and Dunne have spent some thirty years painstakingly amassing some of the most convincing evidence about the power of directed intention to affect machinery. They are absolute sticklers for scientific method, no-nonsense and to the point. Robert Jahn is one of the few people I have ever met who speak in perfect, complete sentences. Brenda Dunne is equally perfectionist about detail in both experiment and language. I would be assured of no sloppy protocol in my experiments if Jahn and Dunne agreed to be involved.

The two of them also have a vast array of scientists at their disposal. They head the International Consciousness Research Laboratory, many of whose members are among the most prestigious scientists performing consciousness research in the world. Dunne also runs PEARTree, a group of young scientists interested in consciousness research.

Jahn and Dunne immediately warmed to the idea. We met on numerous occasions and kicked around some possibilities. Eventually, they put forward Fritz-Albert Popp, assistant director of the International Institute of Biophysics (IIB) in Neuss, Germany, to conduct the first intention experiments. I knew Fritz Popp through my research for The Field. He was the first to discover that all living things emit a tiny current of light. As a noted German physicist recognized internationally for his discoveries, Popp would also be a stickler for strict scientific method.

Other scientists, such as psychologist Gary Schwartz of the Biofield Center at the University of Arizona, Marilyn Schlitz, vice president for research and education at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Dean Radin, IONS' senior scientist, and psychologist Roger Nelson of the Global Consciousness Project, have also offered to participate.

I do not have any hidden sponsors of this project. The website and all our experiments will be funded by the pr...

Customer Reviews

Lotus Guide review
The Intention Experiment: Using Your Thoughts to Change Your Life and the World
By Lynne McTaggart
Lynne McTaggart's first book, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, documented discoveries in science that link us to a quantum field of energy, which ultimately becomes our manifested reality. Now through her new book she is providing the opportunity for people worldwide to take part in the Intention Experiment. She provides much-needed validation for the possibility of creating a new world through our thoughts. This is a great book that you can actually get involved with in a global way. See [...] Rahasya Poe, Lotus Guide, [...]

An Experiment Of Questionable Intention
The book spends all but a few chapters as a reference of all the previous studies done to show that intention and thought does affect our physical world. I've read almost every one of the books written on all those experiments, so it was a bit repetitious. So why another experiment? In the author's own words, "an inordinate number of books have been written about the power of the human being to manifest his or her reality, and while they have served up intuitive truths, they offer little in the way of scientific evidence." Spoken like a true egghead.

We so value the intellect over any other form of knowing, even though in the author's compilation of tests, it showed the heart was higher intelligence than the brain! We let the intellect dominate how we experience reality to the extent that we have obliterated our perspective of common sense. A prime example is a Harvard study costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to show that cheese is the best bait to catch mice. How can our intellect not let us see what already is, unless it is measured by what is provable?

And who can we have do these experiments? The pillars of the scientific community. Guys like Popp: these foremost, leaders in their fields who are hesitant to risk their reputations on any study which might fail, once he has made a name for himself? And these people are supposed to be on the cutting edge? Give me a break. How can anyone respect these people?

What the author and most scientists fail to understand is that we live in a temporal world, but these intuitive truths they want to scientifically prove are eternal. If the scientists don't prove them, do they not exist, or did they prove that their methods are inadequate or their paradigm is insufficient?

Research and The Power of Thought-Great!
An important book on an important subject. A fabulous book that puts together research and science about the power of thought as a reality-maker.Coupled with another favorite of mine that I use daily,Living The Secret Everyday: My Secret WorkbookI have been on a joyful journey in my life.